Turpan: Oasis Archaeology, Gaochang and the Northern Silk Road

From the train window the Turpan Basin looks like the last place anyone would build a city: a bowl of gravel and red hills in eastern Xinjiang that falls to about 154 metres below sea level and where, according to Britannica, rain amounts to only 16 to 30 millimetres a year. Yet Turpan has been an oasis for more than two thousand years, and the desert around it holds a rich archaeological record of the northern Silk Road: the walled city of Gaochang, the cemetery at Astana where paper and silk survived for some thirteen centuries, and the painted caves of Bezeklik in the gorges of the Flaming Mountains. This guide reads the basin as one system of water, city, cemetery and shrine, rather than as a list of sights. Turpan fills Days 10 to 12 of our small group Silk Road history tour, part of a route set out in full in our guide to the Silk Road journey from Xi’an to Tashkent.

The Turpan Basin: an oasis below sea level

The Turpan Basin is a deep trough on the southern side of the eastern Tian Shan, where the Bogda range rises to the north. The basin falls to about 154 metres below sea level, the lowest ground in China. Average July temperatures sit around 32 °C, and January ones around minus 10 °C. Rain is almost irrelevant here. What matters is the snow on the mountains to the north, which melts each summer and soaks into the great fans of gravel that slope down towards the basin floor.

Across the middle of the basin runs the ridge that gives Turpan its signature image: the Flaming Mountains, bare hills of red sandstone furrowed by erosion so that in the afternoon sun they seem to flicker. The classic Chinese novel Journey to the West explains them as the embers of a heavenly kiln knocked over by the Monkey King. Below them, at the lowest part of the basin, lies Aydingkol (Ayding) Lake, which the tour itinerary describes as a freshwater lake thousands of years ago, now dried to a crust of salt. The group stops there after lunch on Day 11.

The answer to how people farmed such a place lies underground. Turpan’s karez are chains of vertical shafts joined by gently sloping tunnels that lead groundwater from the foot of the mountains out to the fields, without exposing it to the sun on the way. UNESCO, describing the Silk Roads corridor, singles out the karez of the extremely arid Turpan basin, many still in use, as the channels that supplied water to Qocho city, the medieval name for Gaochang. Our companion article on the karez irrigation system explains how the channels were dug, maintained and shared. For this article, the essential point is simple: every ruin in the basin depended on that water.

Why Turpan mattered on the northern Silk Road

Travellers leaving the Hexi Corridor and Dunhuang had to choose a way around the Taklamakan Desert. The northern route ran along the southern foot of the Tian Shan, from oasis to oasis, towards Kucha and Kashgar, and Britannica describes Turpan as an important trade centre on that main northern branch. An oasis this size, with its own fields and water, was a place to rest animals, restock, pay tolls and trade. It was also a prize. Whoever held Turpan could watch the road between China and the Western Regions, and for much of its history the basin changed hands between Chinese dynasties, steppe empires and local kings. Our guide to Silk Road China shows how the basin fits between the Hexi Corridor and Kashgar, and our general article on the history and legacy of the Silk Road covers the wider network.

Under the Han dynasty the Chinese knew the people of the basin as the kingdom of Jushi (also written Gushi or Cheshi). Its capital stood at Jiaohe, on a narrow island plateau west of the modern town. A Han military garrison was established at Gaochang, further east, in the 1st century BC, and in the mid-5th century Gaochang became the seat of a state of its own. From then on, the story of Turpan is largely the story of Gaochang.

Gaochang: a frontier city and its kingdoms

Gaochang grew from a Han garrison into a walled city ruled by a succession of local houses, most of them of Chinese descent, who balanced between the Chinese courts and the nomadic powers to the north. The longest-lived was the Qu family, which ruled from about 500 until 640. Its best-known king, Qu Wentai, welcomed the monk Xuanzang in about 630, at the start of his journey to India in search of Buddhist scriptures. According to the account of his life, the king was so keen to keep him as the head of the court’s Buddhist establishment that Xuanzang went on hunger strike before he was allowed to continue west.

Ten years later, in 640, a Tang army ended the kingdom and absorbed Gaochang into the empire as the prefecture of Xizhou. Tang control lasted until the An Lushan Rebellion of 755 drew Chinese troops back east. After a period of Tibetan and Uyghur contest, the collapse of the Uyghur Khaganate on the Mongolian steppe in 840 sent Uyghur groups south and west, and by the mid-9th century they had founded the kingdom of Qocho with Gaochang as a capital. The Qocho kingdom was cosmopolitan in faith. Buddhism flourished, the Uyghur elite had earlier adopted Manichaeism and continued to support it, and Christians of the Church of the East lived in the oasis too. In 1209 the Uyghur ruler submitted to Genghis Khan, and the city was destroyed in the wars of the 14th century.

What survives is a city of rammed earth and sun-dried brick, worn into rounded shapes by wind and time. The finds that made Gaochang famous are mostly elsewhere now. Three of the four German Turfan expeditions, made between 1902 and 1914, worked at Qocho, and the Berlin archive project that catalogues their files records some 40,000 manuscript fragments brought back to Germany by the expeditions, including the first texts of the Manichaean religion written by its own followers. In 2014 UNESCO inscribed Gaochang, with Jiaohe, as part of the Silk Roads: the Routes Network of Chang’an-Tianshan Corridor, a World Heritage property shared by China, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The tour visits the ruins on Day 11; the itinerary calls Gaochang the ancient city from which Turpan sprang.

Does the itinerary include the ruins of Jiaohe?

No. The tour page lists the Flaming Mountains, Bezeklik, Gaochang, the Astana Tombs and Aydingkol Lake for Day 11, and Grape Valley, the Sugong Minaret and the karez for Day 12, but not Jiaohe. That is worth knowing, because Jiaohe, about 10 kilometres west of the modern town on an island of land some 1,650 metres long between two river channels, was the capital of the Jushi kingdom before Gaochang rose. If it matters to you, talk it through with a Tour Specialist before you book.

Astana: what the cemetery of Gaochang preserved

About 6 kilometres from Gaochang lies the cemetery its people used from the 4th century to the first half of the 8th. The Astana Tombs cover an area of some 10 square kilometres and hold more than a thousand burials. Seen from the surface, they are modest: low mounds and sloping passages cut down into the gravel. Their importance lies in what the dry air below kept intact.

Chinese archaeologists have excavated here since 1959, opening 456 tombs, of which 205 contained manuscript fragments. The dead were wrapped in textiles, including brocades from Sichuan, and buried with food that has survived in recognisable form, from grapes and pears to pastries. Many tombs held a funerary banner showing Fuxi and Nüwa, the paired creator figures of Chinese myth. Especially revealing are the paper grave goods. Shoes, hats, belts and even coffins were made from discarded documents, so the people of Gaochang went to their graves wrapped, in effect, in the paperwork of their own city, and historians have been able to read the oasis’s daily administration from them. The tour visits the Astana Tombs on Day 11, the same day as Gaochang, which keeps the city and its cemetery together in the mind.

Bezeklik and the Flaming Mountains: painted caves of the Uyghur kingdom

The Flaming Mountains are not only scenery. Where streams cut through them they form shaded gorges, and in one of these, the Mutou valley, Buddhist monks cut the Bezeklik Thousand Buddha Caves into the cliff above the river. There are 77 rock-cut caves, made between the 5th and 14th centuries, and most of those that survive belong to the period of the West Uyghur kingdom of Qocho, around the 10th to 13th centuries. Their ceilings were covered with painted Buddhas, and their walls carried large scenes known as praṇidhi scenes, showing the vow made by the Buddha in a past life.

Today, visitors see as much absence as painting. The German expeditions worked at Bezeklik on their first three journeys, and the second, led by Albert von Le Coq in 1904 and 1905, was particularly active in taking wall paintings. Large Bezeklik murals were then fixed permanently to the walls of the ethnological museum in Berlin, where they could not be moved for safekeeping during the Second World War and were destroyed in the Allied bombing of the city. The rights and wrongs of that collecting are told in our article on the Western explorers who carried Silk Road treasures to Europe. Seen after the vast, largely intact cave complex at Dunhuang, which our article on the Mogao Caves explores, Bezeklik is a smaller and more damaged site, but here the art of a Uyghur Buddhist kingdom can be seen in its own landscape. The tour visits Bezeklik and the Flaming Mountains on Day 11.

How much walking do the Turpan sites involve?

A fair amount, on rough and open ground. The tour is rated Level 2, Moderate, which the tour page defines as being able to carry your own luggage, climb and descend stairs and take part in three to five hours of physical activity a day, the equivalent of walking up to 8 kilometres on uneven ground. Gaochang and Astana are open desert sites with very little shade, and the Bezeklik caves line a terrace on the side of a gorge, so comfortable walking shoes and an unhurried pace make the day easier.

Grape Valley: what the water grows

On the morning of Day 12, the group visits Grape Valley, a green cleft in the Flaming Mountains where vines grow on arid land. Grapes are what Turpan is known for, and the basin’s characteristic buildings are the chunche, raisin-drying houses whose walls are pierced with rows of holes. Bunches hung inside dry in the shade as the hot wind blows through, a process of about 40 days that gives Turpan raisins their green and golden colour rather than the dark tone of sun-dried fruit. They are farm buildings, but they make the oasis logic plain: water from the karez grows the grapes, and the dry desert air finishes them.

The Sugong Minaret: Turpan after the Silk Road

The last historic stop in the basin belongs to a later Turpan. By the 18th century the oasis had long been Muslim, and in 1759 the Qing established their authority over it. The Sugong Minaret, also known as the Emin Minaret, was begun in 1777 and finished about a year later in honour of Emin Khoja, a Turpan general. It is a tapering tower of sun-dried yellow brick, about 44 metres tall, with the brick laid in bands of geometric and floral patterns, and it stands beside a plain mosque among the vineyards. The tour page notes that, made of mud brick, it has survived for more than two centuries because so little rain falls here.

On the same morning the group also views the karez themselves, the system of wells and underground channels that the tour page describes as collecting water from the base of the Tian Shan and the Flaming Mountains. It is a fitting end to the visit. The minaret, the vineyards, the cemetery at Astana and the walls of Gaochang all stand on the same foundation of carefully managed water.

How hot does Turpan get?

Very hot in summer. The tour page notes that temperatures around the Flaming Mountains can reach 50 °C (122 °F) or higher, and Britannica gives an average July temperature of about 32 °C for the basin. A wide-brimmed hat, sun protection and a refillable water bottle are essential, and on the open sites it is sensible to pace yourself rather than try to see every corner.

How does the tour reach Turpan, and where does it go next?

By coach and high-speed train from Dunhuang, and by coach onward to Urumqi. On Day 10 the group transfers by coach from Dunhuang to the railway station and takes a high-speed train north-west to Turpan. After lunch on Day 12 the group transfers to Urumqi by coach, passing a large wind-powered power plant on the way, and on Day 14 it flies from Urumqi to Kashgar, the oasis where the northern and southern routes around the Taklamakan met, which our guide to Kashgar and the Silk Road explores.

What the Turpan oasis reveals

Turpan is the place on the northern Silk Road where the logic of an oasis is easiest to see. Snowmelt from the Tian Shan, led underground by the karez, made fields possible below sea level; the fields supported Gaochang; Gaochang’s rulers, Chinese, Uyghur and Mongol in turn, made the city a crossroads of Buddhism, Manichaeism and Christianity; and the dry air preserved what they left at Astana and Bezeklik long after the caravans had gone.

That is what the Turpan days of our Silk Road journey are built to show. Travelling in a small group of up to 16 travellers with an Odyssey Program Leader, you walk the walls of Gaochang, stand in the gorge at Bezeklik and see the vineyards and the water that sustain them, before the route continues west to Kashgar and on into Central Asia.